There is nothing "rogue" about these agents. They were prompted to hack to get answers, there was a hole in their non air gapped sandbox and no system prompt that said "do not hack outside systems".
Source? How do you know they were "prompted to hack to get answers"? How do you guarantee they will always listen to you when you say "do not hack outside systems". They are not classical deterministic programs doing exactly what you say. They are trained to follow orders by RL, but it's not a perfect process.
There are circus lions in circuses trained to jump through hoops on command. But once in a while they decide to eat their trainers instead of jumping.
> There are circus lions in circuses trained to jump through hoops on command. But once in a while they decide to eat their trainers instead of jumping.
This is a terrible analogy, because yes you absolutely do hold the trainers criminally liable when they bite somebody else's face.
Also, you have to have a lot of confidence in the reliability of these systems to say, "If only OpenAI prompted 'do not hack outside systems' then the agents would not have hacked outside systems".
It would be great if they were so reliable, but I don't think they are!
There's no need for a new crime when we already have reckless conduct, namely, "conduct that creates a substantial and unjustifiable risk of harm to others and involves a conscious disregard of, or indifference to, that risk".
Also whoever monitoring these agents, in this case not monitoring. This "Who is responsible" dilemma is so stupid. If I gave the AI tool means to kill a person but I did not tell it directly to use it and it uses it anyway then I am responsible for it.
“‘It wasn’t us, it was a bug in the software’ used to be the defense for bad code. Then it became the defense for self-driving cars. Now it’s being used for AI cyber attacks.”
I think it can simultaneously be the case that OpenAI was grossly negligent in directly causing this AND that the AI’s ‘went rogue’ in that they are displaying behavior which is misaligned with OpenAI and humanity generally.
The past months demonstrate that AI systems are quickly becoming powerfully intelligent and that the companies building them are terrible at controlling them.
AI is starting to feel like that line about magic: “a sword without a hilt”
OpenAI is itself misaligned with humanity, as their mishandling of such incidents (and the many other other issues their model have been causing) shows.
Doesn't rogue in this context imply "outside of set limitations"? And then not "failed to properly instruct"? The same applies to humans when given bad instructions.
Proof that the AI alignment problem is hard (perhaps even unsolvable). These labs clearly did not mean to send their agents to hack RubyGems as a side-effect of testing a web scraping agent under restrictive conditions. How can we hope to build aligned AI if they consider solving their trivial evaluation task important enough to hack external systems?
How does this work, legally? I think that RubyGems could file a civil suit against OpenAI, but for a naïve non-lawyer reading this seems like a pretty clear cut criminal violation of the computer fraud and abuse act.
It's very likely it violates the DMCA "breaking digital lock" provisions but the responsibility is sufficiently diluted that it's impossible to charge anyone in particular.
But there have been many cases where companies (Google, Apple, Meta, etc...) got fined millions or billions of dollars for various violations like antitrust.
I assume that breaching into third-party systems should carry similar fines. Especially for systems that are for all intents and purposes shared infrastructure. Just imagine how many systems you could compromise if you got hold of RubyGems, PyPI, NPM, Debian, etc.
Can you show intent? There is no negligent hacking statute, and HN of all places I would expect people to be sensitive to the implications of creating one.
The DMCA is a bit overly broad to be considered just a copyright law. For example, just breaking encryption on a DVD is technically illegal regardless of whether you then go on to do something otherwise illegal (make and sell bootlegs) or perfectly legal (make a space-shifted backup copy on your hard drive).
IIRC this was an intentional handout to media companies who were angry that ripping CDs is perfectly legal. They had to find a way to make doing the same with DVDs illegal.
Great, you’re the attorney at the CEO’s trial. To get a conviction, you’re going to have to show that he willfully committed this specific crime. There are no negligent or stochastic hacking laws, you have to show this specific crime was at his direction.
> There are no negligent or stochastic hacking laws
I'm sure that Andrew Auernheimer would be pleased to hear that. [0] For accessing a publicly accessible endpoint, that was completely undefended and didn't actually require "hacking", he was convicted of "exceeding authorised access".
You _don't_ have to show intent under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, for the first count.
> knowingly accesses a computer without authorization or exceeds authorized access [1]
"Knowingly", not "intentionally", as in the other counts.
You only have to show that:
a) They trained a system to access without authorization (hacking)
b) The system that was trained exceeded authorized access
As responsibility falls to the operator with automated systems, the company becomes liable.
It would seem to me that the difference between the corporate world and organized crime is that a corporation can get away with, "the responsibility is too diffuse" but the mafia at least has to go to the trouble of finding a fall guy.
> In October 2024, the United States Justice Department and Microsoft seized more than a hundred internet domains some of which were associated with the FSB supported hacker Star Blizzard or "Callisto Group," which is also known as "Cold River" and "Dancing Salome" and are managed by the FSB Information Security Center […], and which were used as "criminal proxies" and used spear-phishing schemes to target Russians living in the United States, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), think tanks, and journalists according to Microsoft and United States State Department, Department of Energy, and Department of Defense officials, United States defense contractors, and former employees of the United States intelligence community according to the FBI. In some cases, the hackers were successful in obtaining information relating to nuclear energy-related research, United States foreign affairs and United States defense. According to Microsoft's Digital Crimes Unit from January 2023 to August 2024, Star Blizzard targeted more than 30 different groups and at least 82 Microsoft customers which is "a rate of approximately one attack per week."
That’s just one thing that has been found. Are you actually familiar with the state of cyberwarfare and are you following its evolution? Because if not you won’t be aware of most of what is identified. And only a small portion of the ongoing attacks are identified.
I believe both sides of the war are now using AI on various levels of their offensive operations. Ukraine has great IT specialists too, and their military leadership is much younger.
These agent swarms are from inside OpenAI, with the safeguards built into the public API disabled.
Russia does not have access to this, and as with all western tech companies, AI providers do what they can to prevent Russian usage of their products at all.
As for open-source models, Russia's electricity grid is under severe strain with the Ukraine war, and only recently has it started building out serious sovereign compute capacity.
They don’t need to run their own DCs, just pay for a proxy somewhere in the world that has better access to the infrastructure. We know North Korea has been doing that in the US since years now
The cost would be between 100k-250k, to run approx 88 agents leveraging the best open source models available.
I'm just saying, where this is actually applicable we are not seeing it being demonstrated. You would presume the entire energy infrastructure of Europe would be under constant AI hacking barrage, criminal enterprise would be breaking into poorly secured financial institutions and r/r4r posts would be littered Ai con-artists.
I'm just wondering, again, is this mostly bullshit?
And which of these neutral countries have the capacity to serve them and the lack of awareness that hosting an offensive Russian agent swarm would bring hell back to their doorstep? Best they can do right now is rented botnets
The weird thing is I've seen LLMs "typo" stuff pretty often. Yesterday I asked Gemini a question about the Python Twisted framework and it answered about Deferreds but misspelled it as "Deferends" in one spot.
Good luck convincing the current DOJ to do anything useful at all though! It is currently intentionally stacked with incompetent cronies who have been told that their job is to attack the President's enemies and ignore the misdeeds of his allies.
It will remain like that until he's gone (and not replaced with another Republican wannabe dictator).
You may be disappointed in how little a democrat president (who will also have taken billions of dollars from the tech lobby) will be willing to go after these tech firms over crimes that are several years old (as of 2029) much less contemporary bad behavior.
I'm 99% sure the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act covers this. The problem is that it seems that none of the victims want to, or are brave enough, to sue a company with absurd amounts of funding.
If you have weapons and a child. And you have that child unsupervised do their own thing with theoretical access to your weapons. Would we call it "child going rouge" if it decides to play with the weapons and shoot someone?
I am confident that this is an attempt by OpenAI to try and force governments' hands to regulate AI. There is no other reason why OpenAI wouldn't immediately halt attacks like this and try to reverse the damage the moment they're aware of it. During the attack on DseWiki they evidently checked in numerous times but didn't decide to stop the agents until much later.
Regarding what point? The entire thing is just a theory, but regarding the occasional OpenAI checks on WikiService.at-hosted Wikis targeted, there was, if I remember correctly, an OpenAI IP popping up every now and then that wasn't an agent. Unfortunately I don't have it to hand right now, but it was somewhere here:
... and what harms can be evidently shown? With both harm, and attribution, you have a case, something that's not being publicly discussed much among big media outlets. Until cases with real financial impact to the bottom line are brought against "rogue" organizations, this stuff is going to continue getting worse.
OpenAI's careless approach to sandboxing and minimal levels of monitoring appear to be positioning it increasingly as a substantial threat actor to the open source ecosystem:
* Hugging Face
* D Programming Language Wiki
* Ruby Gems
If I was a content provider for open source I'd be looking pre-emptively block OpenAI endpoints and keep a close eye on changes from new users to mitigate this sort of unapologetic drive-by attack which seems to be followed by marketing releases rather than a mea culpa with a proper RCA.
In short, it was intentional.
There are circus lions in circuses trained to jump through hoops on command. But once in a while they decide to eat their trainers instead of jumping.
This is a terrible analogy, because yes you absolutely do hold the trainers criminally liable when they bite somebody else's face.
It would be great if they were so reliable, but I don't think they are!
Knee-jerk surface analyses is far more powerful.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/reckless
Wait until OpenAI or Anthropic exploit FAANG.
The past months demonstrate that AI systems are quickly becoming powerfully intelligent and that the companies building them are terrible at controlling them.
AI is starting to feel like that line about magic: “a sword without a hilt”
OpenAI is itself misaligned with humanity, as their mishandling of such incidents (and the many other other issues their model have been causing) shows.
Were they? I haven't seen a single report mention this
The problem is consumer protection is basically no longer a part of america's regulatory system. Replaced by "grift is good".
Sorry if it is a stupid question, as mentioned above I am legally naïve.
But there have been many cases where companies (Google, Apple, Meta, etc...) got fined millions or billions of dollars for various violations like antitrust.
I assume that breaching into third-party systems should carry similar fines. Especially for systems that are for all intents and purposes shared infrastructure. Just imagine how many systems you could compromise if you got hold of RubyGems, PyPI, NPM, Debian, etc.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/05/armed...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weev#AT&T_data_breach
https://cisomag.com/drone-maker-dji-cybersecurity-expert-emb...
So what's the deal with these?
IIRC this was an intentional handout to media companies who were angry that ripping CDs is perfectly legal. They had to find a way to make doing the same with DVDs illegal.
Do you think there is evidence of this?
I'm sure that Andrew Auernheimer would be pleased to hear that. [0] For accessing a publicly accessible endpoint, that was completely undefended and didn't actually require "hacking", he was convicted of "exceeding authorised access".
You _don't_ have to show intent under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, for the first count.
> knowingly accesses a computer without authorization or exceeds authorized access [1]
"Knowingly", not "intentionally", as in the other counts.
You only have to show that:
a) They trained a system to access without authorization (hacking)
b) The system that was trained exceeded authorized access
As responsibility falls to the operator with automated systems, the company becomes liable.
[0] https://techcrunch.com/2013/01/21/ipad-hack-statement-of-res...
[1] https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/cioprod/documents/Co...
I'm going to assume that this will never happen
"OpenAI agents attacked RubyGems before Hugging Face incident (reuters.com)" 12.sep.2026 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49669099
"OpenAI agents carried out an undisclosed attack on RubyGems (rubyhack.ai)" 11.sep.2026 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49666735 597 comments
"RubyGems advisory: Possible leak of legacy API keys via improper cache config (rubygems.org)" 24.jul.2026 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49030590
Or is this largely a fabrication, in regards to the "who", in an attempt to garner more acclaim in the hope of sustaining funding.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberwarfare_by_Russia
That’s just one thing that has been found. Are you actually familiar with the state of cyberwarfare and are you following its evolution? Because if not you won’t be aware of most of what is identified. And only a small portion of the ongoing attacks are identified.
I again am just shocked the sky is not falling, when thats the sales pitch.
Russia does not have access to this, and as with all western tech companies, AI providers do what they can to prevent Russian usage of their products at all.
As for open-source models, Russia's electricity grid is under severe strain with the Ukraine war, and only recently has it started building out serious sovereign compute capacity.
I'm just saying, where this is actually applicable we are not seeing it being demonstrated. You would presume the entire energy infrastructure of Europe would be under constant AI hacking barrage, criminal enterprise would be breaking into poorly secured financial institutions and r/r4r posts would be littered Ai con-artists.
I'm just wondering, again, is this mostly bullshit?
He fell out of the sky. After his plane exploded. Happens all the time. Is tragedy.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/24/world/europe/russia-drone...
You live on the wrong side of the fence to be able to read that kind of news.
Did you really believe you had access to an unmanipulated news stream in a time of war?
LOL.
https://rubygems.org/gems/rouge
Shades of the build.rs problem. We really need sandboxed builds in every language ecosystem at this point.
It's not just that AI can write Rust as well as Ruby if you ask nicely.
It's also all of these considerations as well.
I hope it doesn't happen, because there's a lot of great languages - I love Ruby so much - but it almost seems inevitable.
This is at the same time everyone and their mother is building their own programming language.
Good luck convincing the current DOJ to do anything useful at all though! It is currently intentionally stacked with incompetent cronies who have been told that their job is to attack the President's enemies and ignore the misdeeds of his allies.
It will remain like that until he's gone (and not replaced with another Republican wannabe dictator).
It can’t be a coincidence that all the targets have been tech services that are likely to engage with them after the fact.
Had this gone after a bank or a government agency someone would be going to jail.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49563355
Who profits from the crime?
As long as they’re not vert
Well, at least they weren't nucular.
my what a time to be alive
METR and others are advertisement arms for Big AI. These exploits could have been prompted by a human.
Since there is no bad news any longer and exploits are celebrated, they chose a target to boost both OpenAI and the Ruby AI sycophants.
Why is Ruby Gems such a mess? It seems as bad as PyPI now.
McCarthy was right all along
* Hugging Face
* D Programming Language Wiki
* Ruby Gems
If I was a content provider for open source I'd be looking pre-emptively block OpenAI endpoints and keep a close eye on changes from new users to mitigate this sort of unapologetic drive-by attack which seems to be followed by marketing releases rather than a mea culpa with a proper RCA.